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Saturday, September 29, 2012

Jack Layton's unsuccessful designee to the mantle of federal NDP boss spent a lot of money and incurred a lot of debt in his failed leadership campaign. Brain Topp was one of the old Gang of Four, the unofficial policy brain trust (if one can use that expression referring to our federal socialist party) along with Layton's wife, Trinity Spadina MP Olivia Chow and the aged, cranky sage of the west , Ed Broadbent. It was that committee who crafted Layton`s `deathbed letter`of inane platitudes that has become some sort of Sermon on the Mount to the sub-par intellects of the left.

As both a gesture of party solidarity and as a means of solidifying his control at the top, Official Opposition leader `TinFoil` Tom Mulcair is joining Chow and Topp at a fundraiser to help pay off his former rival`s campaign debt. According to the NDP email, `all proceeds will be donated to retire Brian Topp`s campaign loan - part of our party`s commitment to clear the deck and then focus on the next federal election so together we can defeat Stephen Harper.``

The laws around campaign debt are murky and confusing in Canada. Even so, the NDP`s offer of a generous tax credit for paying off Brian Topp`s bills sounds pretty hypocritical. The so-called Next Step Dinner has tables which can be purchased for $1000 and taking money out of the tax base to benefit a party that wants higher taxes and more public spending. If you want Peking Duck dressed with a sour sauce of resentment and a stale fortune cookie predicting years of unwarranted entitlements, then this is the dinner for you.

Friday, September 28, 2012

Judge Frank Marrocco rarely put counsel on the spot during the five month long Nortel fraud trail and did so ever-so-gently yesterday with a simple question to lead Crown attorney Robert Hubbard. But during the Crown`s closing arguments on Thursday, the judge asked whether, in a company that did ten billion dollars in annual business, a few million dollars in misstated accruals, an amount that represented one tenth of one percent of revenues, could not be the result of errors rather than a planned deception.

That question left Crown attorney Hubbard at a loss for an answer, leaving him to mumble that his junior colleague, who also appeared caught off-guard, would address that aspect the next day. This is a trial that has cost the taxpayers millions of dollars and was based on the fact that one of Canada`s largest companies went bust and thousands of investors lost millions upon millions. With all that pain, it was felt someone should be punished, but the Crown picked the wrong people and had no evidence against them.

There had not been a single shred of evidence to suggest that the three accused, former CEO Frank Dunn, Chief Financial Officer Doug Beatty, and Controller Michael Gollogly in any way deceived Nortel`s auditing firm Delloite or Nortel`s shareholders about any of their actions.

If a fraud was perpetrated, the way The Toronto Star reported what was said, the Crown`s argument is that it was perpetrated by telepathy, `The accused in the long-running Nortel Networks Corp. fraud trial didn’t need to tell underlings to falsify accounting entries to trigger return to profit bonus payouts in 2003, the Crown alleged in its closing arguments Thursday “Everybody just knew what to do,” lead counsel Robert Hubbard said.

The irony is that after billions of dollars of bad investments by the previous team of senior executives that had been approved by the board, Nortel`s subsequent leadership, who are now on trial, had the company turned around after the largest ever restructuring of a Canadian company. The workforce was reduced by two-thirds, about 60,000 employees, and the company was on the verge of returning to profitability. But after a financial restatement had to be issued, a frequent occurrence among major companies, the Board hired a forensic audit team to review Nortel.`s accounting practices After a brief investigation, which was not nearly long enough to examine the massive number of transactions involved, one of the forensic auditors, who was contradicted by members of his own team, said there were improprieties. Rather than conducting a more thorough investigation, Nortel`s board immediately went into a panic, suspended Dunn, Beatty and Gollogly, and that led the company into a series of events that caused an unstoppable tailspin.

After more than five months of testimony from 17 Crown witnesses, the most puzzling aspect of the Nortel fraud case is that it was brought at all.

Despite having culled millions of emails from the hard drives of Nortel employees, the Crown could not produce a single instance in which the co-accused — chief executive Frank Dunn, chief financial officer Douglas Beatty or controller Michael Gollogly — instructed anyone to do anything illegal. No gun. No smoke.

Nor has the Crown been able to explain behaviour that suggested fraud was far from the thoughts of the accused. They designed a return-to-profitability plan that deliberately would not trigger payments until multiple conditions had been met over a full year. Nortel rival Lucent Technologies paid its employees a bonus simply for staying with the firm.

When Nortel’s board convinced Dunn in 2004 to replace his chief financial officer, he hired Bill Kerr — a former Nortel CFO who knew more about the company’s accounting than nearly any other outsider he could have picked. Douglas Beatty, the executive Kerr replaced, refused to cut his staff of internal auditors, even though Nortel shrank by two-thirds.

The Crown’s theory of the crime — that Dunn and his colleagues orchestrated a global conspiracy under the nose of Nortel’s longtime auditor, Deloitte — was difficult enough to accept as a starting point. But in the past few months, one witness after another testified about the wide open debate between auditors and Nortel managers over the proper accounting treatment for dozens of key entries in 2002 and 2003.

The Defense will make its closing arguments next week. But based on the lack of substance the Crown offered, this trial which has destroyed the careers of three innocent men, and which appears to have only been brought for the purpose of appeasing public anger, cannot end soon enough.

Thursday, September 27, 2012

(CBS News) NASA's Curiosity Mars rover, slowly nearing its initial science destination where multiple types of terrain come together, has found outcrops of conglomerate rocks made up of eroded gravels that scientists believe were transported across the floor of Gale Crater by a "vigorous" flow of ankle-to-hip-deep water in the distant past.

It's the first observation of its kind on Mars, showing that an alluvial fan photographed from orbit was, as suspected, formed due to the action of flowing water that entered the crater through a 100-foot-deep, 2,000-foot-wide channel dubbed Peace Vallis that cuts through the crater rim and then fans out across a gentle 1-degree slope toward Curiosity's landing site.

She seems to think that spray painting someone is a form of non-violent protest, that she has a right to vandalize private property as a form of "expression" and evidently believes that Jihadi is a race.

When the summoning of roughly 1,500 people to a demonstration in Toronto last Saturday was presented as massive outpouring of Muslim anguish over a YouTube video, the thing that was most immediately conspicuous in its absence was the deafening roar of everybody’s malarky detectors going off at the same time.

In the broader political scheme of things, what the event caused to be most disturbingly conspicuous was the absence of a federal liberal party in Canada.

What was demanded last weekend was that Canadian liberalism should inflict upon itself the final act of its slow-motion suicide. You’d have thought that if a vigorous objection would be coming from anywhere, it would be coming from the Liberal Party of Canada. It didn’t, and it is even less likely that it soon will, now that the delicate princeling Justin Trudeau has unofficially declared his odds-on-favourite candidacy for the party leadership.

It was Trudeau, we should remember, who could only muster a passive-aggressive confabulation of an apology last year for having encouraged black-turbaned misogynists everywhere when he whined that a Canadian citizenship guide that was updated to contain an unfavourable reference to the barbaric practice of honour-killing made him feel, like, you know, “uncomfortable.”

Too bad he had to also prostrate himself and America to them beforehand..

`I have made it clear that the United States government had nothing to do with this video, and I believe its message must be rejected by all who respect our common humanity. It is an insult not only to Muslims, but to America as well..`

A group of HIV health organizations plan to file a lawsuit Tuesday against the federal government for refusing to give prisoners clean needles and syringes.

The group of four organizations, along with former inmate Steven Simons, intends to file a notice of application in Ontario Superior Court against the Correctional Service of Canada, CSC commissioner, public safety minister and attorney general of Canada.

The organizations argue the government has violated the Charter rights of inmates by effectively treating injection equipment as contraband, and are seeking an order to implement a sterile needle and syringe program in all federal penitentiaries.

Monday, September 24, 2012

My pal Michael Coren was out in the thick of things at the anti-blasphemy protest on Saturday in front of Toronto's US Consulate. He got some great footage that tells the truth about what went on there that mainstream news like CBC, CTV, The Toronto Star and others disgracefully sanitized in their coverage.

The CBC made this mostly laudatory puff piece about the now mostly-defunked, asinine Occupy Movement a year after its beginnings. Included is an interview with the mastermind of the inept would-be social movement, Kalle Lasn, the creepy publisher of AdBusters magazine, who with his Estonian family fled to Nazi Germany at the end of the Second World War.

One of the more interesting people to emerge from Canada's Occupy Movement is a fellow named Greg Renouf, who is featured in the CBC report. Renouf was one of the original members of "Occupy Canada," but he became disillusioned after seeing the way unions, the NDP and a number of nefarious individuals usurped what began as a 'leaderless' movement to try to advance their own personal agendas. He has since exposed many of the slimy characters involved with Canada's Occupy Movement and in so doing has become reviled and has even been viciously assaulted by them.

By our standards, it is illegal to marry a nine year old girl. If someone did that, had sex with her at the age of 13 and ordered the beheading of hundreds of people, by our standards he would be considered a bloodthirsty pedophile.

Islam's founder Mohammed did these things.

He wrote the Quran, which, aside from borrowing from earlier religious texts, is full of contradictions and calls to violence.

All religions are illogical and stupid to some degree, but some are more stupid than others.

One, Islam is so frightened of exposure of the hate, violence and stupidity upon which it was founded that it is willing to kill over criticism of its supposed "prophet."

At a rally in Toronto yesterday calling for Islamic-type blasphemy laws to be introduced to western society, a prominent imam and Muslim leader, Zafar Bangash, made the following veiled threat of violence. Referring to the anti-Islam YouTube video that has enraged Muslims throughout the world, he said:

"There
are Christian fundamentalists in the United States and Zionists in the United
States, and in fact right here in Canada as well, who support this kind of
behaviour. And we want to bring to their attention that if you go down that
route, the consequences will be frightening for everybody. We are not a violent
people, we don’t issue threats, but we will not surrender our rights to our dignity,
to our honor, and the honor of our prophet! Let this be very clear, let every
politician in this country take note, that Muslims will not surrender when the
honor of our prophet is violated! We will stand up and defend it no matter
what!"

Other religions can be criticized and mocked without threat of violence. Does Islam demand special consideration because it is an insecure religion built on the weakest of foundations? Or is it that Muslims worldwide are so deprived of the freedoms that westerners have enjoyed since the Enlightenment, they consider that the norm. In either case, if we do not stand up for our freedoms and rights in the face of threats from Islamist totalitarians, we will lose the most important aspect that western civilization has fooght for centuries to achieve. The right to express our ideas as free men and women.

What we need is more mocking of Islam and its founder - if only so that Muslims finally get used to the idea that if the rest of us can take it, they should be able to as well. Or is their religion built on such shaky foundations and lack of logic that they are more insecure and fearful of criticism and being mocked than adherents of any other religion?

Saturday, September 22, 2012

In the public square beside the Ontario Superior Court building, across the street from the US Consulate in Toronto, about two thousand enraged Muslims exercised their right to free speech this afternoon to call for that same right to be deprived to anyone who mocks their religion.

If the gathering and the speakers looked familiar, it's with good reason. The speakers, the organizers and much of the crowds were made up of the exact same people responsible for the anti-Israel al Quds Day hate fest in Toronto last month. In fact, despite the professed excuse of demonstrating against a low-budget YouTube video that denigrates the founder of Islam, Mohammed ibn Abdullah, the rally was clearly an excuse for local Islamists to vent their unrelenting hatred of the United States and Israel. That neither of those countries` governments had anything to do with the film was of course immaterial to them.

The chants were the same as you would hear at any rally where local radical imam Zafar Bangash, who spoke at today`s rally, spews his hatred. For the benefit of anyone whose English or memory for simple expressions of mindless fury isn`t quite up to par, the organizers were thoughtful enough to distribute sheets with the chants printed out.

The only difference with today`s angry throng was, aside from the usual invective against western democracies and promotion of crazed Zionist conspiracy theories was the call for censorship and punishment of those who insult Islam. Among the swarm of grubby, bearded men and veiled women were signs calling for the silencing and punishment of those who mock a long-dead tribal chieftain they believe to have been a prophet. The area resembled a huge outdoor mosque for about an hour as profession of love of Mohammed combined with heavily accented chants of ``Shame, shame USA!`` and ``Shame, Shame Israel!`` filled the air.

A cute female RCMP officer guarding the outside of the consulate I was trying to flirt with laughed when I said to her, ``this must be very...routine.`` But though the anger and slogans were, in an ominous way, the message was different. Today wasn`t just about Muslims hating the west, it was about them trying to stifle western freedoms from within.

With his state funeral yesterday afternoon, the official adoration of former Alberta Premier Peter Lougheed moved beyond canonization into deification.

If other Canadians happened to pause and listen to what was actually being said in Calgary’s 57-year-old Jubilee Auditorium, which was broadcast by the CBC, they could be forgiven for wondering if we Albertans had collectively taken leave of our senses.

Well, Chinga, now you know how the rest of us feel about the saccharine adulation over the late "Community Clinic" Jack Layton.

Friday, September 21, 2012

and with the NDP polling about even with the Tories, it seemed appropriate to discuss a matter I`d written about before regarding the now Official Opposition`s Deputy Leader, Libby Davies:

Generally ignored at the time, Libby Davies introduced a 9-11 conspiracy petition into parliament in 2008. One thing to consider is that it is typically unheard of for an MP to introduce a petition to parliament if they disagree with its premise. For example, Davies isn't going to introduce a petition requesting that abortion be re-criminalized or that immigration numbers be reduced.

But even then, there's a pro forma means by which an MP will introduce a petition to parliament which gives them plausible deniability. They say they're introducing it on behalf of constituents and then read the petition verbatim.

Davies doesn't just introduce the 9-11 conspiracy petition in the routine manner. It was signed by only 500 delusional oddballs scattered across this nation of 35 million and she doesn't read it verbatim. She summarizes it and presents it as if it contains facts to which Canada's Parliament must be alerted and act upon.

Davies' own words introducing the petition are:

"It draws the attention to the House of the following, that scientific and eyewitness evidence shows that the 9-11 Commission Report is a fruadulent document and that elements within the US government were complicit in the murder of thousands of people on 9-11, 2001. This event, the petition points out, brought Canada into the so-called War on Terror that has changed the domestic and foreign policies for the worse, and will have negative consequences for Canada."

Thursday, September 20, 2012

In his last election campaign, Jack Layton said he was `Canada`s Barack Obama` (obviously wishful thinking from a socialist with with a lot less intellect and charisma than the former Harvard law prof).

Is Layton`s party now accusing Obama of running a repressive regime from which refugees need sanctuary?

If an actress is able to get past any written agreement she signed and convince a judge she worked on a film under fraudulent pretenses, more controversy could be around the bend.

Garcia is upset because the film didn't turn out the way she expected. This is certainly a highly unusual situation. She says she was led to believe via a casting notice that she was working on an "historical Arabian Desert adventure film" and it turned into Innocence of Muslims, which she says caused her to lose her job, contact with her grandchildren and her sense of security. (The film has only been published as a 14-minute "trailer" so it's hard to say what it is at this point.)

But it's also not hard to re-imagine her lawsuit under different guises.

"Defendant Bacile's representations that he intended to make an 'adventure' film, and that Plaintiff would be depicted as a concerned mother, were false. Instead, Defendant Bacile made an anti-Islam propaganda film, in which Plaintiff is falsely made to appear to accuse the founder of the Islamic religion of being a sexual deviant and child molester."

Now imagine if the complaint said this:

"Defendant Paul Thomas Anderson's representations that he intended to make a 'buddy' film, and that Plaintiff Joaquin Phoenix would be depicted as an up-and-comer, were false. Instead, Defendant Anderson made an anti-Scientology progaganda film, in which Plaintiff is falsely made to appear to be victim to a cult."

Or maybe this:

"Defendant Jerry Bruckheimer's representations that he intended to make an 'adventure' film, and that Plaintiff Jake Gyllenhaal would be depicted as a strong male lead, were false. Instead, Defendant made a film (Prince of Persia) that caused audiences to laugh at him."

“We are aware that a French magazine published cartoons featuring a figure resembling the prophet Muhammad, and obviously we have questions about the judgment of publishing something like this,” Carney told reporters during a midday press briefing at the White House.

“We know these images will be deeply offensive to many and have the potential be be inflammatory,” Carney said in a prepared statement.

Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Toronto's downtown Annex neighborhood is Canada's epicenter of soft-headed leftist extremism. Its upper-middle class residents are represented in Parliament by Jack Layton's wife Olivia Chow and it is home to the Trinity St Paul Church, which has perverted a religious sanctuary into a house of communist radicalism, housing such organizations as The International Socialists and the pro-Iran so-called "Canadian Peace Alliance." A few blocks west of the church, on Prince Arthur Avenue, just around the corner from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, itself a depraved institution that promotes crackpot racialist, cultural relativist ideologies, is a pub called The Duke of York.

A remarkable, attractive young woman named Terri Chu has taken it upon herself to revive the tradition of public salon evenings, and holds monthly gatherings upstairs at that pub to have open conversations of matters of public interest.

Monday night, the ostensible topic was Charter Rights, but in truth, the gathering was for discussing the violation of the Canadian Charter Rights of confessed terrorist and murderer Omar Khadr.

Two speakers made presentations to the room of mostly middle aged Annex dwellers who were almost to a person sympathetic to the Canadian-born Guantanamo prisoner who was the son of al Qaida bag-man Ahmed Khadr. That sympathy for Khadr was clearly shared by the speakers, the first of whom, Barbara Falk, is an instructor at The Canadian Forces College. A clearly intelligent woman, bespectacled, with hair styled in a military-buzz cut but distinctive in its being dyed bright red, she began with a somewhat selective history of Omar Khadr's life story.

Like so many of Omar Khadr's supporters, she attempted to paint a sympathetic picture of a "child soldier" while ignoring Khadr's commitment to jihadist ideology. She implied that Khadr may not have been physically capable of throwing the grenade that killed Sgt. Christopher Speer and that his confession to that killing may have been coerced. While conceding that Khadr's family was unsympathetic to the public and harmed his cause whenever they speak publicly, Falk didn't make herself particularly convincing by euphemistically referring to Khadr's sister Zaynab and mother Maha as "critical of Canadian foreign policy." That is much like describing Luka Magnotta as "someone with slightly unusual culinary tastes." In actuality, the females in Khadr's immediate family are openly supportive of Osama bin Laden and his goals.

Falk also said that she believes Canadian reluctance to repatriate Khadr is because of racial and religious prejudice and to support her assertion, compared him to American Taliban John Walker Lindh and Australian Guantanamo detainee David Hicks. She indicated that if Khadr had a more Anglo-Saxon sounding name and appearance, he would have been reclaimed by his country as those two had been. Left out of that argument was the fact that Khadr differs from Lindh and Hicks in that he is an unrepentant jihadist who is likely to be surrounded by a radicalized infrastructure in Canada including his family and religious leaders.

Attempting to discredit internationally-acclaimed psychiatrist Dr. Michael Welner, she referred to his report, in which he did extensive research on Khadr, his associates and family as well as interviewing the young al Qaida fighter himself for 8 hours over two days as a "travesty."

One salient observation did emerge from Ms Falk's presentation; that in the new world of asymmetrical warfare, combatants on the side that surrender often continue to wage war in the form of insurgencies and the Geneva Conventions are not equipped to deal with that contingency.

The next speaker was Gavin Magrath from Lawyers Rights Watch Canada. Passionate and affable with a sort of hippie look, he seemed like the sort of leftie lawyer Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind actor Richard Dreyfus would have played well about 30 years ago.

Magrath too was outraged at Khadr's treatment and his denial of Charter rights even though the dilemma of how Canadian Charter rights could be enforced outside Canada was not addressed. More humanization and a softened depiction of the young terrorist was going on, with Khadr continually being called "this kid."

During Magrath's talk, there was an implicit suggestion that when Khadr does return to Canada, his lawyers will try to argue that the violation of his Charter rights should invalidate his conviction by the US military tribunal and he should immediately cease to be incarcerated.

When I heard that, the first thought that occurred to me was that the best solution would be to have Omar Khadr declared a dangerous offender when he returns to Canada so he can be incarcerated here indefinitely.

Keep in mind that this event was occurring in a bar and by this point, I had already pounded back a few rye and cokes (served by cute blond waitresses whose informal dress code appeared to involve mini skirts and knee socks.) And that last matter struck to the point of concern to the overwhelming majority of Canadians who do not want Omar Khadr returned to Canada, ever. So I felt it was my time to pipe up. Conceding that his Canadian Charter Rights rights were violated, I added that nothing said that night addressed the practical considerations of unleashing an avowed jihadist and al Qaida terrorist on the Canadian public.

That remark of mine infuriated a few aging, white-haired socialists at the other side of the room who repeatedly screamed out "he is not a member of al Qaida!!"

Magrath concurred with the enraged Khadr supporters saying Khadr wasn't a terrorist and hasn't even had a chance to pay up his al Qaida membership dues.

If Khadr wasn't in al Qaida, it was a strange coincidence he lived in an al Quada camp, fraternized with al Qaida terrorists, fought with them against the Americans and was filmed building improvised explosive devices for them. But maybe that's just the Afghan version of the Cub Scouts.

My calling out Magrath on being glib without addressing got him to get to the heart of what the position was, that he didn't care whether Khadr was a terrorist or a war criminal, but that he had a right to due process under Canadian law. And then came the more telling point, when Magrath used the "c" word. He identified the real problem, from his perspective, as "colonialism." He continued, "the problem is our going over there with airplanes and warships and Marines and then crying because the people fighting you don't want to put on a uniform!"

And that was everything I could have expected to typify the muddle headed positions of the useful idiots in the west who sympathize with our enemies. On one end was the pathetic cognitive dissonance by some who refused to even acknowledge that Omar Khadr could be a terrorist, despite the fact that even he hasn't denied his involvement in a terrorist group. On the other are people like Magrath who, in his impassioned condition appeared to forget that Khadr, father and son, went over there from here too. For people like that, the impression they give is that they are so obsessed that points of law take precedence over the safety, security and rights of innocent, law abiding members of the Canadian public.

They are basically good people. But they have a pathological devotion to multicultural aspirations and cultural relevance, and in the process have buried their heads buried so far up their backsides they can only hear the sanctimonious musings of their own internal processes.

At one point, it was said that Omar Khadr was a victim of "religious and community" profiling. Anyone whose religion and community believe they are entitled to slaughter infidels at will should be profiled and we have the right to protect ourselves from them. It's unfortunate we also have to fight a battle of ideas against our own citizens who are working to enable the people who want to destroy us.

-------------
you can watch the CBS 60 Minutes segment on Omar Khadr here (including video of his building IED's)

Mother Jones magazine has publicized a video of Mitt Romney discussing the difficulty in establishing an independent Palestinian state because of an unwillingness to achieve peace on the Palestinian side.

Perhaps the strangest aspect of the accounting fraud trial involving Nortel’s three most senior financial executives is this: it’s that the defence has insisted on the most disclosure of evidence, not the Crown. So it was Friday evening, when lawyers for the three defendants — Frank Dunn, Douglas Beatty and Michael Gollogly — submitted their closing written arguments to Ontario Superior Court judge Frank Marrocco.

Some 500 pages of trial analysis from the defendants became available Monday, easily topping the 210 page final statement from the Crown, which was presented to the judge Aug. 3.

It can be reduced to this line: “There’s not a shred of evidence of any overt acts of concealment by the accused with respect to their accounting practices,” the argument notes.

Jim Bagnall has done an excellent job following this trial. Read more HERE

Friday, September 14, 2012

No religion stands up to logical scrutiny. They are all based on faith, which is an abrogation of reason in favor of belief.

That said, some religions are stupider than others. All have intolerant, repressive factions, but in some the violent and hateful are the mainstream while in others they are the fringe.

Islam, as it is practiced in most of the Muslim world, is the most coercive of the world's major religions, and that can be attributed to both the nature of its origins and the political and cultural histories of the counties in which it dominates.

One of the major distinctions between Islam and other faiths is that predominantly Muslim countries have not undergone the political evolution in the west that has separated religion and state. That is one of the reasons why apostasy is considered a crime punishable by death within Islam. Abandoning Islam is seen not only as a betrayal of religious belief but as treason against the state, of which many impose Sharia law as the law of the land.

Islam is a religion that, at its origins, was spread by the sword. When the basis of a religion is "worship as I say or die," it will have an understandable insecurity about being mocked or criticized. Having been born of a chauvinistic, misogynistic tribal desert culture, it is even more sensitive to insults.

The current round of violence and riots through the Islamic middle east partially drive from their confined understanding of free societies. By western standards in general and American in particular, there is no free speech and free press in the Islamic world. They have laws against blasphemy and apostasy. Journalists can be jailed or worse for criticising the government or religious institutions. Most inhabitants of Muslim countries just don't get that America doesn't operate that way. Because that's how things work for them, they assume that by not jailing people who make fun of their prophet, the American government must somehow be complicit in the insults.

In fact, many Muslim leaders who have immigrated to the west still don't really understand western concepts of free speech. A typical example comes from Toronto, Canada-based Zafar Bangash, the pro-Iranian Imam and President of the York Region Islamic Society, who said in an interview to Iranian state-controlled PRESS TV:

"I think all US officials whether they are in the Congress or in the government or elsewhere are quite familiar and aware of the fact that the honor of the Prophet of Islam is a red line for Muslims and that insulting him is basically taking a stab at the very core belief of the Muslims and that this kind of blasphemous act should not be permitted and yet US officials advance this curious notion that people have the freedom of speech and expression."

What may be a 'curious notion' to Bangash is a fundamental, sacred right to Americans and most people in free societies of the sort that Islamic cleric fails to comprehend. The right of individuals to express themselves, even in poorly made, offensive, intentionally insulting movies, is guaranteed under our laws. Jesus and God himself and prophets of both of Christians and Jews are routinely made fun of in America. But no one is killed over it and that in part is a testament to the confidence of those religions and the civilized societies in which they abide.

Democracy literally means "government of the people." Islam literally means "submission." The two ideas are not compatible. Either people can be free to rule themselves or they will be forced to submit to autocratic tyrants who use religion or other means to impose their will. We may be reaching the stage where if Islam doesn't find a way of reforming, democracies will need to find a way of defending themselves from the religion that demands submission.

UPDATE - to prove the point, no one has been murdered because of this image(h/t Blazing Cat Fur)

Thursday, September 13, 2012

Noam Chomsky is a propagandist, a cultural and moral relativist, and is completely full of crap.

Five Feet of Fury wrote a great little piece demonstrating how the sage of American anti-capitalists occasionally produces clever-sounding quips that prove to be complete lies if one bothers to give them cursory examination.

The Palestinian Authority's bid this year to have the United Nations recognize statehood for an independent Palestine has been derailed for the time being. The United States and its allies in the Security Council have prevented the matter from coming to a vote. Part of the story of that so-far unsuccessful effort is told by Participant Media's new documentary State 194.

The movie follows Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad`s efforts to create the institutions necessary to have the stability for Palestine to be able to function as an independent country. Fayyad,who was appointed to his position by PA President Abbas, is a former International Monetary Fund economist who by all accounts is an honest proponent of peace and a highly competent leader. But he is one person and his views are not generally reflective of the whole of Palestinian society, and that is the part of the story that State 194 completely avoids.

In fact, if you were to rely on the image of Palestine conveyed by State 194, you would think that Palestinian society in the West Bank is a secular, progressive one where in fact the opposite is true. In some ways, it`s as if someone filming a community of Inuit living in igloos north of Tuktoyaktuk were to present it as reflective of Canadian society. Sure, it`s there, but it sure isn`t a full and accurate representation of our society.

The film tries to make the case, as did its Israeli director Dan Setton and producer Elise Pearlstein in an interview I conducted with them yesterday, that Palestine is ready for statehood today. The facts on the ground belie that.State 194 is its director`s expression of hope for peace. But the movie is also blatant propaganda. Subtly anti-Israel and overtly pro-Palestinian, it places all the blame for the Israeli-Palestinian problem on `the occupation`without in any way addressing what the reasons for that occupation are. The neighbouring Arab states tried to wipe out Israel before `the occupation`and no one was interested in creating an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza when they were ruled, respectively, by Jordan and Egypt from 1948 to 1967. Then the Arab solution to the need for a Palestinian homeland was to eliminate Israel, a view still held by many in the West Bank and the government in Gaza. These are impediments to peace that are ignored in State 194.

The disaster in Gaza demonstrates that if the conditions for statehood don`t exists, anarchy and terrorism will readily take over. Fayyad`s efforts are honorable and important, but he is far from achieving his goals. Palestine is not a democratic society and indications are that if free elections were to be held there, he would be defeated and removed from office.

Ironically, as if to demonstrate the discrepancy between the image the film tries to create and reality, Salam Fayyed was scheduled to be at the Toronto Film Festival gala premier of State 194 on Monday night, but had to cancel because of riots in Ramallah over the economy.

The first movie ever distributed by Participant Media, which produced State 194 (and other notable documentaries like An Inconvenient Truth and Waiting for Superman), was another pro-Palestinian movie called Arna`s Children. That movie followed a theatre group in Jenin where Juliano Mer Khamis, who was the son of a Jewish Israeli mother and Palestinian Arab father, provided peaceful means for expressions of Palestinian self-determination and opposition to Israel. In yet another tragic irony, he was murdered last year by Palestinian radicals who objected to his providing a non-violent outlet that could divert their youth from the path of jihad.

That is part of the reality of Palestine that State 194 doesn't want to talk about, but until it is resolved, remains an overwhelming obstacle to peace.

Setton's movie presents a good, detailed look at a tiny piece of a larger puzzle. If you keep that in mind, while realizing that you're not seeing anything close to the larger picture, for all its flaws, State 194 is worth sitting through.

Tuesday, September 11, 2012

In a bit of weird and unfortunate news, Emmanuel Jal, a Toronto-based South Sudanese Hip Hop artist who was in his native country`s capital to hold a concert promoting peace was mugged and robbed by 5 police officers on Sunday night.

Jal, whose ``We Want Peace-Reloaded`` video feature appearances by celebrities like Jimmy Carter, George Clooney, and Ringo Star, was in South Sudan preparing a concert for International Peace Day on September 21. He was mugged and robbed by 5 police and national security officials in what appears to be a random attack unrelated to his political activities.

Monday, September 10, 2012

And in other news, the judge behind the notorious Zombie Mohammad case is facing the possibility of a judicial review.

The case involved a man dressed as Zombie Mohammad who was assaulted during a Halloween parade. His attacker was not only acquitted, but the victim received a lecture from the judge about insulting Islam. No, not in some 3rd world backwater, or Eurotrash country that routinely tramples on free speech rights, but in Pennsylvania!

Saturday, September 8, 2012

Iran's duplicitous, propaganda-happy Foreign Ministry, embarrassed at having to announce the sudden and unexpected expulsion of its diplomats from Canada yesterday, is making preposterous claims about the Iranian embassy in Ottawa having been attacked.

No such attack has ever taken place in Canada, but Iran is a country whose leaders lie as freely to its own people through its state-controlled press as it does to the rest of the world in its lies about nuclear weapons ambitions.

The Tehran Times reports:

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TEHRAN - Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast said on Friday that the Canadian government’s decision to close its embassy in Tehran illustrates that it is pursuing the policies dictated by the Zionist regime and Britain.

..The Foreign Ministry said Canada has a bad reputation for protecting diplomatic headquarters and personnel and has repeatedly failed to protect the Iranian Embassy in Ottawa against attacks.

To the indifference of the United Nations, in a desolate part of Africa, by the hundreds of thousands, the world`s worst ongoing genocide since the reign of terror by Pol Pot`s murderous Khmer Rouge continues.

Sudan's Omar al-Bashir

The genocide in Sudan has faded from public attention, and the deaths are likely to continue for a long time because the homicidal campaign of President Omar al-Bashir to turn his country into an Islamic, Arab state has help throughout the Muslim middle east and from conniving accessories here in the west.

And if you say anything about it, you are an Islamophobe! Or at least, that's what lots of western enablers of a racist genocide in Africa would like people to believe.

Can you imagine even the most elementary discussion of the Holocaust without mentioning Jews and Germans? Or of the Turkish genocide of Armenians without mentioning Armenians? It sounds too ludicrous to be taken seriously.

But the equivalent happened last Wednesday when Gerald Caplan, New Democratic Party adviser and stalwart of the radical neo-Marxist website rabble.ca, wrote an article in The Globe and Mail chastising Canadian Foreign Minister John Baird for his supposed inaction on Sudan.

Not once will you find the words Arab, Islam, black, or Muslim in Caplan's article. Caplan neglects to mention whom is killing whom in Sudan or why. Relying on Caplan's information, one is left to assume the Sudanese genocide is simply a case of a criminal president murdering random civilians. But the truth is that these murders are not random at all. They are part of a systematic campaign by Muslim Arabs in Sudan to eradicate non-Muslim blacks.

Why are Caplan and his ilk unwilling to speak out about the motives, the perpetrators and the victims in Sudan? The answer is that motivated by trying to seek common cause with the "anti-imperialist" (i.e. anti-American, anti- Israel) Muslim world, they are fearful of pegging any atrocity they may commit to Islam. Because Arabs are among the downtrodden in their idiotic, Manichean, Marxist division of the world between oppressor and oppressed, nothing may be said against them. Instead, they obsess over the transgressions committed by capitalist countries that are inherently democratic and respectful of human rights while favoring totalitarians they see as sympathetic to their anti-capitalist aspirations.

This attitude is quite happily exploited by Islamists and their helpers in Canada and the west.

A case in point was illustrated when a member of the Canadian Public Employees Union (CUPE) challenged Ali Mallah, the union's then Vice President for Diversity, on its inaction regarding the Darfur genocide while it invested enormous resources for efforts such as vilifying Israel over its defensive actions in Gaza which resulted in a fraction of the casualties inflicted by Muslim forces in Sudan.

The response from Mallah, who not coincidentally was also a Vice President of the Canadian Arab Federation, was remarkably revealing. His answer (with his spelling and syntax errors included) was in essence to justify doing nothing by attributing attention towards Sudan to an imperialist, anti-Arab, Islamophobic conspiracy:

".. We had a a tense discussion about this issue and It was the International Solidarity committee and later the executive of CUPE district decision not to be dragged into a suspicios calls by some organizations (that are well known of its biases and disregard to Human rights) to participate in demonstartions that based on Islamophobia and prejudices while shedding crocodile tears over Darfur, Sepecialy when it is paving the way for another Imperialist project led By G.W. Bush, Condie and the rest of the gang. also, part of the debate was focused on the fact that there attempts to divide the people of Sudan Sudanees as Arabs VS Africans. I am sure you agree with the fact, that Sudan is an African Country and its people are Africans regardless of religion and languages/ dialect."

Mallah is a close associate of the notorious pro-Iran advocate Zafar Bangash, an Islamist radical Imam who operates from York region, north of Toronto, with the two of them regularly appearing back-to-back at local anti-Israel rallies.. Bangash claims to decry racism, but his angry, volatile personality causes the veil to slip from time to time, revealing his antipathy towards blacks, having called US President Obama "that black man in the White House" and a "perfect Uncle Tom." As pro-democracy Muslim moderate Tarek Fatah has noted, Arab racism towards blacks and people with dark skin is worse than anything he has ever seen in the west.

CUPE and the union-financed website rabble.ca, published by the spouse of NDP Deputy Leader Libby Davies, are not alone among so-called "social justice" advocates who turn a blind eye to the racist, Islamic genocide of blacks in Sudan.

Alternatives International is a Montreal-based NGO that receives about a million dollars a year from the Canadian and Quebec governments. The organization, which has been able to maintain charitable status despite its financing of blatantly political campaigns, is supposedly concerned with human rights throughout the developing world. Not surprisingly, Sudan is absent from its list of campaigns. What is interesting is that Ali Mallah is on the Board of Directors of Alternatives.

Another group that lays a questionable claim to being a "social justice" organization is the Canadian Peace Alliance. While doing nothing to advance the cause of peace, they do act as Canadian advocates for Iran, a repressive, brutal, authoritarian regime that is the world's most blatant sponsor of terrorism. But there is not a mention of the genocide in Sudan among their campaigns.

That shouldn't be too big a shock. Guess who is on the Steering Committee for The Canadian Peace Alliance... Ali Mallah!

Romeo Dallaire wrote a book called Shake Hands with the Devil in which he told the tale of trying to save the lives of Tutsi in Rwanda. Canada's leftists could write a book called In Bed with the Devil, where they can talk about how they sold out blacks in Sudan, and their souls, for the approbation of Islamists.